You returned from your last visit to him in the Burj al-Barajneh camp defeated, in despair. You asked me for sleeping pills and decided to stop going to see him. His son, Jamil, wanted to send him to the mental hospital. You objected and even wept. Everyone saw you weep. You told them, “Impossible! Adnan is a hero, and heroes aren’t locked up in a lunatic asylum.” It’s said you pulled out your gun and tried to shoot him. People intervened to stop you, saying it was a sin. “The real sin is that he won’t die. The sin is that he should live like this, you bastards.”

Why didn’t you tell me you pulled out your gun? And why didn’t you kill him? Why did you let them take him away to the Dar al-Ajazah Institution? Did you believe that place was the same as a hospital? I swear it wouldn’t even be suitable for a beast. The patients there are crammed together like animals, they live a thousand deaths each day.

This time, allow me to give another version of the facts.

With your permission, I won’t let Adnan end this way. I’ll tell you what happened in a different way.

Yunes, Abu Salem al-Asadi, went to visit his friend Adnan Abu Odeh in the Burj al-Barajneh camp. This wasn’t his first visit since his release from the Israeli prison where Adnan had spent eighteen years. Yunes was at the head of the group that welcomed him home. He danced, fired his rifle into the air, and slaughtered sheep in his honor. He’d embraced Adnan and told everyone, “Hug him, smell the aroma of Palestine!”

Everybody sat in the Abu Odeh clan’s guest hall eating lamb and rice and drinking coffee, and Adnan said nothing except for a few words that were lost among the ecstatic youyous of the women — and even the men, that day. The camp was flooded with a sea of colors — the women wore their multicolor peasant dresses and poured out onto the dusty streets of the camp as though they were back on the streets of their own villages.

When the party was over and everyone had departed, Adnan went back home with his family and sat down among his children and grandchildren. He embraced them all and kept repeating, “Praise be to God!”

Everyone laughed when Yunes related the events of the trial.

“Stand up, Adnan, and tell us the story!” said Yunes.

Adnan didn’t stand up, or tell them the story, or laugh, or clap; he didn’t repeat for them what he’d told the judge: “Do you really think your state is going to last another thirty years?”

Yunes told the story and everyone laughed, while Adnan remained immersed in his deep silence.

“You see, Adnan, twenty years have passed. There’s still plenty of time to go!”

At that moment Adnan began to manifest strange symptoms. He would raise his voice, then fall silent. He spoke an incomplete sentence and mixed in Hebrew words.

Yunes thought he was just tired. “Let the man rest,” he said. “He’s exhausted.”

He said goodbye to Adnan and promised to visit him in the next few days.

A week later, news began to arrive of Adnan’s madness, but Yunes refused to believe it. He went back to his friend’s house to see for himself — he saw and wept and returned distraught.

But things didn’t end there.

One morning, Adnan’s son, Jamil, came to Yunes to inform him of the family’s decision to move Adnan to the mental institution and asked him to get a report from a doctor at the Palestinian Red Crescent.

This is where Dr. Khalil — that would be me — comes in. He went to the Burj al-Barajneh camp, examined Adnan and said he was suffering from depression and in need of long-term neurological treatment, but there was no need to put him into a hospital. Adnan’s condition worsened, however, to the point where he would leave the house naked. The writing was on the wall, and Jamil came to me for help. I explained my diagnosis and the man exploded, shouting that he couldn’t take it any longer and that he’d made up his mind and it didn’t matter whether I wrote the report or not.

Yunes decided to intervene.

He went to Burj al-Barajneh and knocked on Adnan’s door. Jamil welcomed him, then started complaining and telling him stories. Yunes told him to be quiet.

Yunes went into the living room where Adnan was sitting in his pajamas listening to Umm Kalsoum’s “I’m Waiting for You” on the radio and swaying to the music. Yunes greeted his old friend. But Adnan remained absorbed in Umm Kalsoum, as though unaware of him.

Yunes pulled out his gun, fired one shot at Adnan’s head and shouted, “I declare you a martyr.”

Then he bent over his blood-covered friend and embraced him, weeping and saying, “It wasn’t me that killed you, it was Israel.”

Adnan died a martyr. They printed his photo on big red posters, and he had a huge funeral the likes of which had never been seen before.

Don’t you think this ending’s much better than yours?

You should have killed him the way they do a wounded stallion instead of letting him be taken there.

Instead, you came to me asking for sleeping pills and left your friend to die a gruesome death in that place.

I saw him there, and I know he spent his final days screaming and then in a coma having shock treatments, but I never told you because you were busy and only wanted to hear what made you feel good.

As far as you were concerned, Adnan ended in the courtroom with his “This is the land of my father and my forefathers.” You’d clap your hands and laugh, saying, “Thirty years! God bless you, Adnan. There’s still plenty of time to go, Adnan. The years have passed, and we’re still in the camp.”

“It was time that pushed Adnan over the edge,” you told me. “Don’t count the years. We need to forget. The years pass, that doesn’t matter. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred years, what’s the difference?”

You let Adnan die like a dog in the hospital, and his son didn’t have the courage to announce his death. The Abu Odeh family didn’t take part in his funeral. They buried him secretly, as though there’d been a scandal. Even you, his lifelong friend, didn’t go to his funeral.

Now do you understand my confusion?

The temporary confuses me because it scares me.

“Everything’s temporary,” you told me when we met after the disaster in ’82. And during the long siege at Shatila in ’85, you said it was temporary. “Listen, we have no choice. However dire the circumstances are, we have to keep on living or we’ll simply disappear.”

I know your views, your eloquence, and your ability to make the impossible sound reasonable.

But what would happen if we were to remain in this temporary world forever?

Do you believe, for example, that your present condition is temporary?

Do you believe that I’ll stay here in your temporary world trying in vain to wake you, telling you stories I don’t know, traveling with you to a country that I’ve never seen?

What kind of a game is this? You’re dying right in front of me, so I’ll take you to an imaginary country!

“Don’t say imaginary!” I can hear you protesting. “It’s more real than reality.”

Very well, my friend. I’ll take you to a real country. Then what? I can’t stand any more illusions. I want something other than these stories stuffed with heroic deeds. I can’t live forever within the walls of fiction.

Should I tell you about myself?

There’s nothing to tell. I have nothing to say except that I’m a prisoner. I’m a prisoner of this hospital. Like all prisoners, I live on memories. Prison is a storytelling school: Here we can go wherever we want, twist our memory however we please. Right now, I’m playing with your memory and mine. I forget about the danger hanging over my life, I play with yours, and I try to wake you up. The fact is I no longer care whether or not you wake up; your return to life doesn’t matter anymore. But I don’t want you to die, because if you die, what will become of me? Would I go back to being a nurse or wait for death at home?